Syracuse LBGT community responds to anti-gay graffiti

Jim Commentucci / The Post-StandardArtRage director Rose Viviano sits in front of pictures and gay pride slogans that are posted at the ArtRage gallery in Syracuse in response to anti-gay graffiti that was scrawled on the gallery window earlier this month.

Graffiti before the art

See a video of ArtRage gallery founder Dik Cool discussing the graffiti..

The challenge to Syracuse's lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgendered community came in black permanent marker.

"There is no such thing as a proud queer!" someone wrote on the window of the ArtRage Gallery, 505 Hawley Ave., over the July 4 weekend.

The community responded with a mass, artistic "Oh, yeah?"

Amit Taneja, assistant director of the Syracuse University's LBGT Resource Center came up with the idea to collect photos of local people holding signs identifying themselves as proud members or allies of the LBGT community.

Lauren Hannahs, a graduate assistant at the resource center, brought the idea to local gay establishments in the Hawley-Green neighborhood. Taneja created a blog and Facebook page to spread the word.

"Once people heard about it, the e-mail in-box was flooded with people sending pictures," Hannahs said. "Our goal was to have 100 responses in two days and we had over 200."

ProudinCNY

ArtRage will be closed this week,but the Proud In CNY installation piece will be visible through the first week of August, according to gallery director Rose Viviano. More than 200 photos of the display have been posted online..

The resource center paid to have the photos printed large. By punching holes in the photos and linking them with paper clips, the photos now hang from hooks inside the glass. The original graffiti remains on the glass outside.

Rose Viviano, director of ArtRage, said the gallery focuses on social change and social justice issues. She said the installation is both good social activism and good art.

"This is quintessential community art," Viviano said. "It was a real community initiative and it was real art."

Hannahs said she's not interested in finding out who left the graffiti on the window.

"Our purpose was to say, 'You can say these things, but it's not going to break the spirit of this community,'" Hannahs said. "We took the high road on this."